"Something" exists, but is not exactly mature, been used mostly just for a
very large and rapidly changing codebase (ie Quantlib, which should stabilise
after the 1.0 release 'real soon now') with moderate success and hence
doesn't get off the ground for more.

My conjecture is that it would take off rather forcefully if only there were
one or two use cases for moderately-sized well-known libraries, providing
both use cases and usage templates.

| ~ So what to do? Firstly, I don't get that crash on load on my Linux
| box. So we would have to investigate further, but at least it does work
| somewhere. And such extreme failures are actually less worrying than the
| potential lack of functionality in the bindings.
|
| ~ Soeren has already been in touch with me and indeed the
| code in the SWIG distribution comes origially from the RSWIG source on the
| omegahat repository. Unfortunately, the person who took that code
| and put into the SWIG distribution did by himself and didn't seem
| to want to work together to improve it add get it beyond the experimental state
| it was in. Futher, he apparently listed me as the contributor,
| but haven't communicated at all with the SWIG developers and so I do not have

I think that is not true. Joe Wang had me CCed on a few email he had with the
Swig maintainers. He either has or had write access to the Swig repo, and
that seems to make sense as he was, afaik, the only one showing up there. Or
did you ever offer your code for inclusion there?

| access to the SWIG repository and cannot change the code.
| So we have a little bit of a problem that might have been better dealt with if
| code had continued to be developed outside of SWIG by the R community.
|
| ~ If there is nobody interested in using SWIG in R, then there is little point
| in fixing it. I have been working on an alternative way to generate bindings using
| output from GCC (gcc & g++) and exploring how the bindings should work

Sure, that is very well for you as a research project, but Swig is there, is
rather mature, understood and widel y used -- just not as much with R as it
could be. IMHO we'd better off focussing on getting Swig working.

| generally. Most of the ideas I think would be able to go back into SWIG
| and that _might_ be an easier tool for people to use who don't want more control
| over the code generation or to do analysis on the code itself.
| But if nobody other than the two of us is interested in using a general interface code
| generation mechanism, then perhaps we shouldn't waste too much time on such
| general resources. However, I think it is of value and I think
| we can fix up the SWIG module with a little collaboration.

There is definitely interest. Eg from the Quantlib angle, a few people
expressed interest a few months ago to revive the R/Quantlib integration via
Swig but nothing much has come of it yet. We're all too busy it seems.